gator corporation

PC Pitstop is 10 years old. Can you believe it? That’s right, PC Pitstop officially opened its doors in March 2000, exactly 10 years ago. As a former SVP at Gateway Computers, I had noticed that support costs were growing faster than revenue. “There had to be a way to automate the process of diagnosing and fixing common computer ailments”, I thought. And voilà, PC Pitstop was born.

Our tests were revolutionary for its time using principles of cloud computing that would become popular close to a half decade later. As millions of computers came to our web site for PC help, we were also able to collect the world’s largest database of PC statistics.

Since September 2003, PC Pitstop has been conducting a survey of users who have Gator or GAIN (Gator Advertising Information Network) applications installed on their PC. Our goal was to determine how much permission had really been granted to “permission based marketing” companies by users who install applications such as Gator’s.

PC Pitstop has the unique ability to survey users to add qualitative information to our quantitative analyses. Since April 2004, we have been surveying Gator and When U users about their experiences with their software. The following survey question was asked to Gator users after their PC’s were tested but before their test results were displayed